[Infowarrior] - Report: NSA surveillance program too secret for its own good

[Richard Forno]

Report: NSA surveillance program too secret for its own good
The new inspectors' general report on the Presidential Surveillance  
Program is a doozy, with major political ramifications for both  
parties. But its biggest implication is that the Bush administration's  
obsession with keeping its surveillance program a secret seriously  
hampered the broader intelligence community's ability to use the  
program's output.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/nsa-program-too-secret.ars

By Jon Stokes | Last updated July 14, 2009 12:15 AM CT
I've written extensively on the many basic problems that make all  
government-run, computer-automated mass surveillance programs a waste  
of taxpayer money. But a new report (PDF) from the Offices of  
Inspectors General of the Department of Defense, Department of  
Justice, CIA, NSA, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence  
shows in some detail how our government took the bad idea of building  
powerful computers to sniff out a terrorist needle in a digital  
haystack, then made it even less useful in practice.

The new OIG report on the NSA-run Presidential Surveillance Program  
(PSP), of which the previously revealed warrantless wiretapping  
program was just a part, contains a number of stunning revelations;  
I'll go through some of those in subsequent articles. But perhaps the  
report's greatest value is in the way that it provides a glimpse into  
how the secrecy-obsessed Bush administration actually sabotaged the  
NSA's massive, law-free surveillance program by overly restricting  
intelligence personnel's knowledge of and access to it. In short, the  
PSP was too secret for its own good.

A throat so deep
One of the pervading themes of the OIG report is that the PSP was  
really, really, really secret. It was so secret, in fact, that the  
president himself picked which non-operational personnel were to be  
"read into" the program. So if you weren't actually involved in the  
day-to-day running of the NSA's giant SIGINT vacuum, then the  
commander-in-chief personally decided whether you should know that it  
even existed.

This extreme level of secrecy posed myriad practical problems when it  
came to actually using the PSP's output in the day-to-day counter- 
terror work that goes on at a number of agencies—DHS, CIA, FBI, the  
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and so on. Almost none of the  
working-level analysts who might benefit from the PSP's output were  
allowed to know of the program's existence, so getting that output  
into those workers' hands meant carefully stripping it of any hints  
about its provenance, thereby rendering it significantly less valuable.

The problem was especially acute at the FBI, which wasn't as widely  
looped in on the PSP as the CIA (more on the latter, shortly), despite  
the fact that the Bureau is involved in domestic counter-terrorism.  
When the few people at the FBI who were in-the-know about PSP's  
existence got "product" from it, they had to be very careful about  
what they did with the information, lest some lowly FBI guy in the  
trenches learn of the existence of the program.

But even if FBI agents had known of the existence of PSP and of the  
origin of some of the tips they were getting, that still wouldn't have  
been much help. Just ask the CIA, where more people knew about the PSP  
but still had no idea how it worked.

The multibillion-dollar electronic anonymous tipster
The CIA seemed to have an easier time dealing with the PSP since more  
of its people were read into the program, but there were still serious  
problems. Most of those who had knowledge of the PSP were senior  
managers and not the working-level personnel who could have made  
practical use of the PSP's products.

The report notes that even for the few working-level CIA folks who  
were read in, "much of the PSP reporting was vague and without  
context," so they wound up relying more on other, more familiar and  
accessible analytical tools and sources. The briefing that CIA folks  
were given on read-in didn't tell them much about how PSP worked or  
how to use its products, and without that knowledge the output of the  
program was of limited intelligence value.

Like journalists, CIA officers are trained to consider the source of  
their incoming information in order to evaluate it by placing it in  
context. In the case of the PSP, the source was a giant black box—a  
sort of electronic anonymous tipster who would periodically drop  
vague, context-free nuggets into the already unmanageably wide inbound  
information stream that they had to sift each day.

This black box problem highlights the key barrier that the PSP's deep  
secrecy raised to its effectiveness in the war on terror. The output  
of any information-gathering system will eventually have to be  
evaluated by a human; but for any human knowledge worker who is tasked  
with looking for a slender needle of relevance in an overwhelmingly  
large informational haystack, any additional data that arrives free of  
context, where the worker doesn't have any understanding of the  
mechanisms that produced it, is noise, not signal.

You can easily imagine that when the NSA tells a CIA analyst, "Here's  
a tip to add to your pile of things to look into; it comes from our  
giant, computerized black box, and you have no idea how that box works  
or how it actually decided that this (potentially vague) tidbit was  
important," the analyst may prefer instead to tune out that incoming  
data and to turn instead to the tools and sources he knows.

It wasn't just the CIA that ran into the black box problem. According  
to the OIG report, "NCTC analysts noted that the NSA policy protecting  
the source of the PSP information would have resulted in them not  
fully understanding the value of the PSP information."

Another widely quoted section of the report bears out this same point:

NCTC analysts involved in preparing the threat assessments told the  
ODNI OIG that only a portion of the PSP information was ever used in  
the ODNI threat assessments because other intelligence sources were  
available that provided more timely or detailed information about the  
al-Qaida threat to the United States. During the interviews, the NCTC  
analysts noted that PSP information was only one of several valuable  
sources of intelligence information available to them.

In the end, the PSP's secrecy put it at a disadvantage vs. other  
sources of information that working-level analysts knew and trusted.  
So when the OIG sought to isolate the impact of the PSP on the  
nation's intelligence-gathering activities, the best that analysts in  
one agency after another could tell them was that the PSP product was  
just one source among many, and a difficult one to use at that.

The PSP was shrouded in such deep secrecy partly for operational  
security reasons, but also because of political considerations. Some  
of what went on under the auspices of the PSP was later determined to  
be illegal, and in the next article we'll take a closer look at the  
darker corners of the program.